Poets & Writers Blogs

The National Book Foundation has revealed its Five Under Thirty-Five honorees for 2009, all of whom are recognized for debut books. The five writers, chosen as they have been since the Five Under Thirty-Five program began in 2006 by former National Book Award (NBA) winners and finalists, will be celebrated by their nominators and a host of lit lovers at a celebration in New York City kicking off National Book Awards week later this fall.

The honorees are:
Ceridwen Dovey for her novel Blood Kin (Viking, 2008), selected by Rachel Kushner, 2008 NBA Fiction Finalist for Telex from Cuba (Scribner, 2008)

C. E. Morgan for her novel All the Living (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), selected by Christine Schutt, 2004 NBA Fiction Finalist for Florida (TriQuarterly Books, 2004)

Lydia Peelle for her novel Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (HarperCollins, 2009), selected by Salvatore Scibona, 2008 NBA Fiction Finalist for The End (Graywolf Press, 2008)

Karen Russell for her story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves  (Vintage, 2006), selected by Dan Chaon, 2001 NBA Fiction Finalist for Among the Missing (Ballantine Books, 2001)

Josh Weil for his novella collection The New Valley (Grove Press, 2009), selected by Lily Tuck, 2004 NBA Fiction Winner for The News from Paraguay (HarperCollins, 2004)

The event celebrating the five will take place on November 16 at Brooklyn's PowerHouse Arena, a popular venue for literary events and home to the art book publisher PowerHouse Books. The honorees will read from their works at the party, emceed by New York City punk rocker and novelist Richard Hell. Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem will serve as the evening's DJ.

The National Book Awards, now in their sixtieth year, will be announced the following Wednesday, November 18, at the foundation's annual dinner in New York City.

Poet Linda Gregg of New York City received high honors from the Academy of American Poets today as winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Fellow poets Dorianne Laux, J. D. McClatchy, and James Richardson selected her latest collection, All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2008) for the twenty-five-thousand-dollar award, given for a collection published in the previous year.

The book, Gregg's eighth, also won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America (PSA) in March. Gregg's poetry has been recognized by PEN American Center, with the PEN/Voelcker Award, and Poets & Writers, Inc., with the Jackson Poetry Prize, and she has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Gregg, who has said of her work, "The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human," receives from the Academy an award named for a writer and activist who promoted the sacredness of the world in her own right: Lenore Marshall helped form the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, an organization that helped pass the partial nuclear test ban treaty of 1963. The New Hope Foundation created the prize in her memory in 1975.

The list of past winners—a group that includes John Ashbery, Wanda Coleman, Stanley Kunitz, and Alice Notley—is posted on the Academy's Web site.

Gregg reads at the Jackson Poetry Prize ceremony in May:

There are only two days remaining to enter the Short Fiction Contest from Zoetrope: All-Story, the lit mag founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997. Not only will the winner receive a prize of one thousand dollars and publication on the magazine's Web site, but he or she, along with nine finalists, will also be considered for representation by a number of literary agencies. The ten top story writers will have their work reviewed by the William Morris Agency, International Creative Management, Regal Literary, the Elaine Markson Literary Agency, Inkwell Management, Sterling Lord Literistic, and the Georges Borchardt Literary Agency.

The judge this year is Yiyun Li, author of the award-winning story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Random House, 2005) and The Vagrants (Random House, 2009), which is up for the 2009 First Novel Prize from the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction. She is a contributing editor of A Public Space.

Stories of up to five thousand words can be submitted, along with a fifteen-dollar entry fee, via the journal's online submission system until 11:59 PM on Thursday, October 1.

The winner of last year's contest was Bernie McGill of Portstewart, Ireland, for "Sleepwalkers," selected by Elizabeth McCracken.

On Sunday three Canadian writers were revealed as the winners of the 2009 ReLit Awards, honoring books published by independent presses in Canada. Poet Maurice Mierau of Winnipeg, Manitoba, won for his book Fear Not (Turnstone); Lisa Foad of Toronto won for her debut short story collection The Night Is a Mouth (Exile Editions); and Michael Blouin of Oxford Mills, Ontario, won for his novel Chase & Haven (Coach House).

The prizes, operating under the banner "Ideas, Not Money," award each winner a ReLit ring, comprised of four movable, letter-embossed bands that allow the wearer to spell out different words. Mierau, Foad, and Blouin will receive their rings at a celebration that will take place during the Ottawa International Writers Festival on October 25.

The winners were selected from shortlists of seven books in each category. The finalists were:
Poetry
Noble Gas, Penny Black (Brick) by David O’Meara
Little Hunger (Nightwood) by Philip Kevin Paul
Dead Cars in Managua (DC Books) by Stuart Ross
Penny Dreadful (Signal) by Shannon Stewart
Troubled (Coach House) by R. M. Vaughan
Sentenced to Light (Talon) by Fred Wah

Short Fiction
Squishy (DC Books) by Arjun Basu
Evidence (Porcupine’s Quill) by Ian Colford
My White Planet (Thomas Allen) by Mark Anthony Jarman
In the Quiet After Slaughter (Libros Libertad) by Don McLellan
Elysium (Anvil) by Pamela Stewart
The Butcher of Penetang (Caitlin) by Betsy Trumpener

Novel
Cleavage (NeWest) by Theanna Bischoff
Shuck (Arsenal Pulp) by Daniel Allen Cox
A Slice of Voice at the Edge of Hearing (Mercury) by Brian Dedora
Girls Fall Down (Coach House) by Maggie Helwig
Charlie Muskrat (Thistledown) by Harold Johnson
Anna’s Shadow (Esplanade) by David Manicom

The ReLit Awards, whose name stands for "regarding literature, reinventing literature, relighting literature," have been given since 2000.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced today the twenty-four recipients of this year's "Genius" Fellowships. The fellows working in the literary arts are poet Heather McHugh, fiction writer and memoirist Edwidge Danticat, and short story writer Deborah Eisenberg. They will each receive one hundred thousand dollars every year over the course of five years.

"It felt incredibly, wonderfully surreal,” Danticat told the Felicia R. Lee of the New York Times. "What artists crave and need most is time. It will definitely buy some time. It’s wonderful to have a sense of security, especially in these economic times."

Danticat's most recent book is the memoir Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf, 2007), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. Eisenberg is the author of four story collections, including Twilight of the Superheroes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). The latest book from McHugh, who has also worked in translation and essay, is the poetry collection Upgraded to Serious, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in October.

As 2009 MacArthur fellows, the three writers are in the company of artists working in media including painting, documentary film, and photojournalism, as well as luminaries in other disciplines. Recipients this year include an ornithologist, a papermaker, a climate scientist, a mental health lawyer, a bridge engineer, a biogeochemist, and an applied mathematician.

The no-strings grants are given in the anticipation of independent creative achievement in the future—that is, according to MacArthur Foundation president Robert Gallucci, "We're looking for you to continue in a creative way, without anyone looking over your shoulder."

The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction announced on Wednesday the shortlist for its 2009 First Novel Prize. The ten-thousand-dollar award aims to promote the career of an emerging U.S. fiction writer by honoring his or her debut novel.

The finalists, whose books were all published in 2009, are:
Paul Harding for Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press)

Yiyun Li for The Vagrants (Random House)

Philipp Meyer for American Rust (Spiegel & Grau)

John Pipkin for Woodsburner (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Patrick Somerville for The Cradle (Little, Brown)

A committee of American writers selected the shortlisted books from a pool chosen by the Mercantile’s librarians, staff, and members.

The winner, announced on November 9, will join the ranks of One Story editor Hannah Tinti, who won the prize for The Good Thief (Dial Press, 2008); Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz, honored for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, 2007); and bestselling author Marisha Pessl, who received the prize for Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking, 2006). Tinti will present this year’s prize at the Center for Fiction's annual benefit in New York City, during which the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction will also be given to Gerald Howard, vice president and executive editor of Doubleday.

Check out a book trailer for The Cradle, touring the Wisconsin landscape for sites from the novel:

Here's an interview with Woodsburner author Pipkin, who talks about the process of writing the historical novel:

The Academy of American Poets announced on Monday that it has awarded poets Jean Valentine and Harryette Mullen two of the organization’s top honors. Valentine received the Wallace Stevens Award, which carries a prize of one hundred thousand dollars, and Mullen won the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Academy Fellowship.

Valentine is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Little Boat (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Her work has been recognized in the past with grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. In a press release, Academy chancellor and poet Gerald Stern describes Valentine’s work as sometimes existing "in a dream-world, with all the immediacy, the panic, the odd journey that dreams give. But add to that a great moral vision, infinite skill, and beauty."

Mullen, whose most recent book is a compilation of three volumes previously released by small presses, Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (Graywolf Press, 2006), is the author of Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California Press, 2002), Blues Baby: Early Poems (Bucknell University Press, 2002), and Tree Tall Woman (Energy Earth Communications, 1981). Academy chancellor Susan Stewart calls Mullen a "a magician of words, phrases, and songs" who has “has sparked a revolution in poetic diction."

The Wallace Stevens award is given annually to an established poet who has demonstrated mastery of the art. Past winners include James Tate, John Ashbery, and Louise Glück. Given since 1937 to recognize poetic achievement, the Academy Fellowship has been awarded to Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop, among other notable poets.

Valentine and Mullen will both appear at the Academy's Poets Forum, which takes place on October 15, 16, and 17 in New York City, to read their work and participate in panels on poetry.